IN SEARCH OF 'WHITE GOLD'
China’s winter sports industry hopes Olympics will lead to a financial lift. By Tony Munroe in Zhangjiakou, China
China’s snow sports industry is pinning its hopes on people like Shi Haoping, 32, who takes to the slopes to de-stress from his job as head of an online education company.
“This is such a physical activity, it relieves the pressure for me,” Shi said while taking a break from snowboarding at the Thaiwoo Ski Resort in Zhangjiakou, not far from where several Winter Olympics events will be held in February.
Shi was seated with his wife, Ding Yaohui, who works for a video production company, and their Shiba Inu dog.
Music from an X Games snowboarding event thumped in the background.
“First we learned skiing,” said Shi, who had made the three-hour drive from Beijing. “Then last year we took up snowboarding, because it looks more trendy and cool.”
China hopes that holding the Games will springboard the country toward becoming a winter sports destination and will help deliver on a target set by President Xi Jinping to get 300 million Chinese involved in winter sports, with an aim to build a 1-trillion-yuan (US$155 billion) industry.
The stakes are high, and not just for China, as the global snow sports industry looks to rising incomes in the world’s most populous nation to offset stagnating participation in traditional ski markets.
China wants to build a thriving winter sports ecosystem, from success on the slopes — some of its best Olympic medal hopes are in the freestyle ski and snowboard events — to world-class resorts and the manufacture of equipment to service them.
The country has more than 700 ski areas but the industry is highly fragmented and most are tiny. Only about 20 would be considered destination resorts, including Thaiwoo and the nearby Genting Resort Secret Garden, which will host the Olympic freestyle skiing and snowboarding competitions.
With snowfall scarce in many parts of China, including the winter sports hub of Zhangjiakou, the necessity of water for snowmaking limits intensive resort development.
Industry insiders say the longerterm challenge is to ensure the full experience is enjoyable — from renting gear to the quality and standards of teaching, and the après-ski social activities — so more beginners want to spend the time and money to become regulars.
Justin Downes, president of Axis Leisure and an adviser to the Games organisers, said the Chinese ski industry is unrecognisable from when he arrived in 2007.
Even so, he added, it takes years to build a ski culture and the infrastructure around Chinese ski areas, many in farming and mining areas, has yet to be developed.
“If you go to a ski resort in Switzerland or in Canada, you’re walking into a community of people that have been there for generations,” the Canadian said.
Skiing and the Games are transforming parts of Zhangjiakou’s once-impoverished Chongli district. Chongli was connected two years ago with Beijing by a high-speed train that takes less than an hour.
Skier visits in China doubled from 10.3 million in 2014, the year before Beijing was awarded the Games, to a peak of 20.9 million in 2019, before Covid emerged.
On a five-year average, China ranks eighth globally in skier visits, according to the 2021 International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism by industry expert Laurent Vanat, with the United States, Austria and France making up the top three.
China’s government is all in, even declaring an “urgent” priority to promote production standards for equipment such as snow makers, snow grooming machines and all-terrain snow vehicles, an industry dominated by European and American manufacturers.
The local private equity firm Hillhouse Capital, whose founder Zhang Lei is an avid snowboarder, owns half of the Chinese business of Vermont-based Burton Snowboards, the industry pioneer.
Three years ago, the Chinese athletic wear giant Anta Sports, a sponsor of the Beijing Games, led a group that paid €4.6 billion for Amer Sports, a Finnish company whose portfolio includes the venerable European ski equipment brands Atomic and Salomon, as well as the high-end Canadian outerwear brand Arc’teryx.
On a recent early season day at Thaiwoo, which has a Western-style resort village with a brewpub and shops for global brands such as Bogner and Patagonia as well as the Chinese snowboard maker Nobaday, the crowd was well-attired.
Unlike in the United States and Europe, where skiers are predominant, China’s snow sports market skews toward boarders like Anthony Zhang, 31, who works in finance and was decked out in 15,000 yuan worth of gear including a baby-blue snowsuit and pink snowboard for his first time on genuine slopes.
“It’s very expensive. It’s not just equipment — it’s a big expense to hire a trainer,” he said. “I take classes in an indoor simulator in Beijing, and each class costs several hundred yuan.”
The expense is not a deterrent, however.
“I have money,” Zhang said, laughing.